1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a user-worn appliance to protect against bodily injury, and more particularly to a user-worn appliance that provides protection by a garment incorporating geodesic dome structures placed at vulnerable areas of the body.
2. Background Art
An important consideration for many individuals is protecting relatively vulnerable regions of their bodies from impact forces likely to be experienced in their particular environments, such as while playing sports.
It is well known that ice hockey requires hard body contact on the part of the participants, both with one another and the surface of the ice. Some forms of in-line or roller skating competitions make analogous demands on the participants. Other sports such as football also involve potentially injurious contact. As a result, protective padding is used under the uniforms worn by football and hockey players and other participants in contact sports.
Traditionally, the design and construction of sports body pads for the upper body, especially in the case of American football or hockey, has employed a semi-free floating shoulder plate. This design requires the use of a jersey as a means of shoulder pad containment to prevent interference (via the up and down flapping motion) while playing the game. However, not all skaters feel compelled to wear a hockey uniform when they skate, nor do all skaters play hockey. Additionally, people engage in backyard games, such as football, where no uniform or jersey is worn and where often no traditional padding is available.
Protective devices have been provided for many years and have previously been unusually heavy and cumbersome to move in. Materials used in past have been steel, fiberglass or other strong and heavy material. While these material have provided protection for various parts of the body, they have had the disadvantage in that they lack flexibility, making them difficult to conform to the body of the user, and have also been heavy and cumbersome to use. There have been some lighter padding types created. For instance, some padding types are comprised of laminated sheets of cushioning material, each sheet having adjacent trapped air pockets. However, these pads are prone to popping when impacted by a sharp instrument, for instance a rock. Hence, these pads would not really be suitable for applications such as backyard football or rollerhockey.
Also, most sports padding to date has not allowed air to flow through the padding. As a result, the padding is often very hot to conduct sports activity in, causing the wearer undue discomfort.
Additionally, various individual appliances have been suggested to protect localized body portions from external forces. These non-integrated appliances, however, only provide limited protective coverage and normally require adhesive to secure them. Most of these appliances have a pad adhesively secured to the wearer and a rigid shield secured to the pad. The shield is configured to absorb and disperse external forces to which it is exposed, so as to prevent the underlying vulnerable body region from suffering from their effects. One major limitation of many prior adhesively secured protective appliances is that they tend to "wear" off the user with time. Simple body movements cause sections of the adhesively secured pad to be pulled away from the skin. Though the sections may re-adhere to the body, the bonding strength of the adhesive is substantially weakened. Over time, the adhesive securing the appliance becomes so weak it can no longer hold it to the body. As a result, the appliance falls off the user and usually has to be replaced. As a consequence, these localized adhesive pads are really not suitable for contact sports or sports where the player is moving constantly and cannot anticipate which area of his body will be subject to impact.
Therefore, what is needed is a fully integrated protective body appliance that is light, flexible and durable and which would allow air flow through to provide ventilation.